


Herbarium

by karin6824



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-09
Updated: 2015-07-13
Packaged: 2018-04-08 13:16:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,580
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4306515
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/karin6824/pseuds/karin6824
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Katniss wouldn’t want a flower because it’s pretty. No, she'd want a flower because she likes studying them. She likes to know their names and then save them, pressed carefully inside her books.</p><p>Katniss and Peeta, age 11. Modern AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Gerbera

**Author's Note:**

> Based on the story "Forget-me-not" from a book called "We aren't unbreakable" by Elsa Bornemann (I'm not sure if it's available in English).
> 
> I think this was the first book I cried with (if my memory is anything to go by). I must have been 11 years old at the time when I read it for the first time and I remember it breaking my heart. So, of course, I hold it very dearly and it lives tucked under the covers in the cosiest corner inside my mind, right beside chocolate chip cookies.  
> I’ve re-read it countless times through the years, even though is a children’s book. And I read it again when the author died a couple years ago and it felt like my heart had been broken all over again, like I had lost a dear friend in a way, even though I never met her and never even tried to communicate with her in any way. But I sort of feel like she would be happy with me writing. But then again, this is just me talking with my younger self.  
> I really, really, hope that I can make it any justice.
> 
> Please, if you ever get your hands on that book, read it. It has the loveliest stories.
> 
>  
> 
> I don't own THG, English is not my first language, all mistakes are mine, etc, etc.
> 
> Enjoy

He hoped what he had saved would be enough. It wasn’t much, he knew that he would never be able to buy a bouquet, but he’d be content with just one flower. That’s all he needed. Besides he would need the money for what he had planned for later.

Katniss isn’t an ordinary girl, you see. She would rather wear pants than a dress, not like the other girls. And unlike the other girls that liked leaving their hair down, Katniss always has her hair in two braids, secured by bright red ribbons at the ends. And she can run faster than most boys in their class. And when she sings, it’s so beautiful, that the birds fall silent so that they can listen to her voice. And Katniss wouldn’t want a flower because it’s pretty. No, she would want a flower because she likes studying them. She likes to know their names and then save them, pressed carefully inside her books.

 

It was the end of the school year and they were playing secret friend on the last day; a way to say goodbye until the next year started again. Katniss didn’t like playing secret friend. First, because she didn’t like secrets. And second, because she didn’t have many friends. She said that she was happy with having only Peeta, and Madge, and sometimes Delly, but not all the time. Besides, she has her little sister Prim, whom she can play with when she’s at home.

But the teacher had insisted that everyone had to play. “Imagine if you didn’t receive anything, how would that make you feel?” had said Ms. Effie.

The game was easy enough. It began a week before the school ended, on Friday. That day everyone had to go to the front and pick a piece of paper out of a fish bowl and then return to their seat. On every piece of paper, with a pompous handwriting, had been written the name of a student.

Then, when they were all back in their seats, they could open them and find out the name they had been given. Some of his classmates, like Cato or Marvel, would always open their papers before they were allowed to and would make a show of breaking the rule.

But the most important rule, and what could turn the entire game into a success or a failure, was keeping said name a secret; which, like all rules – especially those for eleven years old – was often broken as well.

Every year since they had begun playing, Glimmer and Clove, would immediately gush over whom they had been assigned, whispering furiously to each other.

Peeta, on the other hand, treated it like he was part of the CIA and had been entrusted with a special mission. Hunching over his desk, he would discreetly unfold the paper and under very guarded hands and his forehead almost touching the table, to the point where he could barely see the paper in the dark and shadows, he would read the name written on it.

And that year, his heart skipped a beat when he didn’t even had to squint to decipher that the name was none other than Katniss Everdeen.

Holding his breath, he folded it back to the way it was and waited for everyone to read their papers, his fingers crossed, praying that no one got their own name. If that happened, they would all have to put their papers back in the fish bowl and then pick one again.

Thankfully, he was allowed to keep it.

 

The week that followed, they were supposed to drop hints for whom they had been designated, at least one, but they could be as many as you wanted. In the meantime the student had to figure out who their secret friend was. On Friday, the last day of school, the secret friend would reveal themselves with a gift for the person.

In theory, it was all supposed to work perfectly. But it had to be taken in account that the game was being played by eleven years old, who liked to gossip a little too much, ask too many questions and whisper too loudly. So in reality, most of the secret part wasn’t so secret.

On the second day, Peeta quickly discovered whom he had been assigned to. Leevy had sat next to him in Math and had informed him that she knew who it was. She had taunted him the entire period, Peeta desperately trying to focus on the lesson, while she kept bribing him with the information if, in exchange, he would tell her whom _he_ had gotten. When the bell rang, Leevy was so annoyed by being ignored that she told him anyways, “Delly Cartwright, okay?! Now you tell me!”

Peeta just grinned and shook his head.

 

Peeta had planned out the hints he would leave and had decided he would give Katniss one each day, making four in total. On Monday, he arrived a little earlier than usual, so he could get there before her. He stood beside the window inside the class, waiting for her to arrive, and when he saw her coming, he rushed to her seat and left a small bag with a cheese bun and a note signed by ‘your secret friend’ inside, before quickly moving away to his own desk and looking busy with opening and closing the zippers of his bag and moving stuff around.

He quickly realized the mistake he had made with his clue, when he noticed that the other students that were playing along had only bothered with little notes and messages that had two lines tops written on them. No one else had brought something to their secret friend. And something from the bakery none the less! He felt like an idiot. He thought he would surely be discovered on that first day, but Katniss seemed as oblivious as always when she asked him if he had seen any of their classmates buying a cheese bun.

 

The next day, to avoid all the unnecessary attention, he just left her a little note, squished inside her pencil-case when they went out on recess. But today, everyone had brought something for their secret friends, clearly trying to compete with what he had done yesterday; Delly Cartwright (she didn’t know that he knew) left him a pack of pink bubblegum on his desk.

On the other hand, he wasn’t even sure Katniss had noticed the note he had left for her, if she had, she didn’t comment on it at all, and that, somehow, was even worse than her asking him about the cheese bun.

 

The following day, he decided to play it low and see what everyone else did and then take his cue from that. The students brought a mix of gifts and notes and things pretended to be a well thought gift, but were clearly someone’s snack, like the PBJ sandwich Madge received.

 

On Thursday, the last day for clues, and the day-before-last to end the school year, Peeta decided he wouldn’t give consideration to what anyone else did or didn’t bring. The day before, on Wednesday evening, he had gone to the flower shop to buy a Katniss for Katniss, but to his awful surprise, they didn’t had any.

But then, he had stumbled on another flower, with red petals and a dark brown centre, it reminded him a bit of a daisy, with the long and soft petals, but with a different colouring and in a bigger size. It reminded him of Katniss, because of its strength, yet simplicity. He settled on buying that one.

When he left the flower shop, purchase in hand, he had barely crossed the door, when he quickly had turn back around to go inside and ask for the name of the flower. “Gerbera,” the florist told him with an amused expression.

Once at home, he made a delicate drawing of the flower, paying the most careful attention, trying to capture and translate every detail to the paper.

 

The next day, on Thursday, he gently laid the flower on her desk, accompanied by a little signed note. And when Katniss later approached him, her brows furrowed, she kept wondering why her secret friend hadn’t put the name of the flower on the paper. It seemed she almost took it as an insult. Peeta looked away, trying to hide his blush on his face, while mentally kicking himself.

 

On Friday, when they have to reveal themselves for those who haven’t guessed or don’t know who their secret friend is yet, he gives her a book. A plant book. Because he knows she has been pressing flowers and leafs between the pages of her school books and then writing about them on her notebooks, the delicate petals of the flowers often breaking when trying to pass them from one to the other.

He slowly approaches her, as if she were a wild creature, and hands her his gift. She mumbles a soft ‘thank you’ in return, before ripping away the wrapping. The moment she sees what is hidden beneath, she beams at him, so brightly her entire face lights up, and throws her arms around him, catching him of guard.

Katniss only seems to notice what she’s doing when their classmates start teasing them and then she quickly pulls away, embarrassed by her behaviour.

She looks down and examines the book, opening the first page, and he turns even redder while she reads what he put on it, but he can’t help returning her shy smile when she looks back up.

She studies the picture of the flower he had painted the day before. The name of the flower, at the top of the page, is almost a drawing within itself, put there in a careful handwriting, an attempt to imitate Ms. Effie’s curly letters. But the description, (of a flower he knew nothing about) is what captures her attention.

Right under the title, on the right side of the page, in that clear scribble that is entirely Peeta’s, it states, “A Gerbera, because it has a brown head smartly held by red ribbons like a girl I know.”

 

At the end of that day when they’re allowed to go home and the holidays have officially began, Katniss hurries back towards him from across the school yard, before he gets inside his older brother’s car. When she reaches him, she shyly gives him a dandelion and then, quickly checking around them to make sure that no one is looking, a soft kiss on his cheek.

 

 


	2. Forget-me-not

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was written with the South-hemisphere in mind. This means Christmas is during the summer and school starts in March.
> 
> Thank you for reading!

 

Katniss didn’t want to ruin the Gerbera Peeta had drawn, so when the real one had started to wither, she just took the petals from it and attached them with a special glue to the paper, spreading them all around, the bright red colour brightening the page as it had done with her bedroom during the weekend it had spent with her.

The first addition, right after the Gerbera, was Dandelions; that same afternoon. Five dandelions, to be exact, strewn around the page, with words that jumped from one to the other, all telling about a blonde head filled with curls of curly thoughts, as curly as the eyelashes that tangled above eyes as blue as the sky the dandelions looked upon.

Then came the Katniss flower, where she let her father write the inscription ‘ _As long as you can find yourself, you'll never starve_ ’, framed by the green arrow-headed leafs Peeta had drawn around it.

And, in the next page, Primroses, filled with giggles and ribbons and a cat, courtesy of Peeta, peeking from the corner of the page.

They spend the summer filling the plant book.

Soon, more flowers and leaves and plants followed. All with little drawings Peeta later added and small inscriptions beneath or around them. Not necessarily facts, sometimes just random thoughts or a small composition.

 

“Fern”

_Peeta brought me this sprig of his mother’s precious fern, an adventure all on itself. It came with a little spider, walking up and down between its leaves. “The inhabitant is yours as well,” he told me. “You gonna have to find her a different home before pressing it inside your book though.” The little spider is now the proud resident of flowerpot #2 in the back garden. Peeta keeps teasing me about it._

“Poppies”

_Popping pretty flowers that pop out of the blue._

And then, a scrawny childlike handwriting appears right under that, clearly belonging to Prim, from a time that Katniss unknowingly left her alone with the book.

_ANd ThEN thEy tuRn rED!_

 

“Spring snowflake”

_Found it near the Meadow, covered in dew. I shook it a little, because I knew. I knew those were tears and I don’t like when my flowers are sad. Don’t be afraid my dear, I whispered, things aren’t so bad. Let spring come this way, don’t worry, I won’t let you melt away._

 

“Clovers”

_They’re three leafed. The fourth leaf were all added by Peeta and his paintings, it’s the compromise we agreed upon when he kept insisting on me waiting to add them to the book and give him time to find me a real one. After, when he had finished cleaning his brushes, he said, “I’ll get you one anyway, you know that, right?”_

And they keep adding more. “Daisies”... a little twig of “mistletoe” hidden between pages, the guardian of a secret ... “Carnation” ...  “Apple leafs” taken from the tree behind the bakery ...“unidentified leaf” aka ‘the myth’ ... “Pansy”... “Sunflower” petals...

 

But the collection is suddenly interrupted and there are no plants that follow. Only empty pages, except for the very last one. There, carefully pressed, lies a small bouquet of Forget-me-nots. Katniss states so, right beneath them, before writing the last lines that end the plant book.

She’ll never forget how she got her hands on them.

The school was back on and they had an excursion day. The entire class went on a field trip. They were walking on a path between the tree line and the river side. The teachers had organized them in two lines, so that everyone had a partner, and they were to stay in them until they reached the meadow, where they were going to have a picnic. Peeta and Katniss were the last ones of the group.

Not soon after they had started the trek, Katniss and Peeta decide to go at their own pace and slowly trail behind the rest of the group, going unnoticed by their teachers.

They take their shoes off; their feet falling into step on the grass, soon coming back covered in dirt. “What would Ms. Effie say!” they laugh, “Imagine if she saw us!”

“Shoes make statements!” Peeta imitates in a high falsetto, “And right now, your dirty feet are just screaming ‘pigsty’!” They cackle away.

Ms. Effie isn’t there to scold them. They’re kids and they’re free. They bask under the sun and relish on the sound of the river and the smell of pine and earth. They get drunk on the fresh morning air and each other’s laugh. They play to see who can find a plant for the book first...

“I win, Peeta!” Katniss exclaims suddenly, “Light blue flowers!”

“Where?” Peeta’s face lights up, her excitement sneaking up on him when he sees her wide smile.

“There!” she points, “On the river bank, up ahead.”

“I’ll go get them!” Peeta rushes to where Katniss indicated.

“No, Peeta!” she calls after him “It’s dangerous, come back! I’m okay with just watching them from here!”

He is deaf to what she’s saying and soon reaches the river. He drops his bag on the grass, before he starts stepping on the rocks to go pick the little flowers.

Katniss runs after him, her braid flying behind her. Peeta is already there; he crouches and grabs the flowers, yanking them from the stem, and when he stands back up, he raises his arm up in the air, crowing in victory. She smiles a little at his display. He goes to step on the other rock, and begin his return to land, when he slips.

It seems to happen in the blink of an eye. His victory shout turning into one of fear. His arm still extended throwing the little flowers in her direction, desperately trying to reach for something. Him, falling into the water.

The shout of his name lost in the rush of the river, a flock of birds flying away at the shrill of her scream.

And when the blink ends, he is gone.

 

At some point, someone must have noticed that they had trailed behind the group, because when she tries to go after him, she’s held back by a strong pair of hands. She doesn’t know when they came back for them. She just knows that Peeta fell into the river and doesn’t know how to swim and he isn't answering her shouts, and that the hands holding her back won’t let her go to rescue him. Someone dashes pass her, Mr. Boggs, she realizes, when she see him running along the river side, looking for Peeta. She can hear behind her, Ms. Effie trying to calm down her classmates, while talking on the phone at the same time.

That means Mr. Haymitch is the one restraining her, making shushing noises that feel ridiculous to her ears, her nails buried in his arms, which he doesn’t seem to mind. She tries to fight and bite and kick, but only ends up falling on her knees. Her head bowed to the ground. Dark dots start to appear on the earth, traces of the tears that keep streaming down her face.

That’s when she sees them. Little light blue flowers. Strewn all around her. The ones Peeta threw as he fell.

It takes her a moment to recognize them, her eyes blurry from tears. Once she does, she chokes on her sobs, only crying harder.

 

“Forget-me-not”

_It’s been three months._

_At first I dreamed of you every night. I still do. But now they're nightmares, mostly. The panicked expression that clouded your face as you slipped into the river, always on a loop inside my head._

_But there were good nights, too. Few, and now farther in between._

_Nights where I wished I could stay asleep forever. Those ones, where we are still walking along the tree line, and I never spot those flowers. Instead we go deeper into the forest and decide to stay live there. Other times, I’m alone in the path and you’ll come find me, knotting your fingers with mine and taking me with you, into the woods. We always end up there, in Neverland. You laugh when I say you make the finest Peeta Pan, the corner of your eyes crinkling that way. In return, you call me Katniss Darling. We get lost in exotic smells and giggling sounds. And trees. We build a safe haven. And every night under the canopy of leaves, we huddle together, star-gazing, and you tell me stories, of fairies and kings and sailing ships. And we remain forever, age eleven._

_But it will all come crushing down when, at some point, I’ll inevitably wake up, realizing it was dream. And you are still gone._

_And I’ll feel like withering away. Just like that Gerbera you first gave me. And I don’t know who’d be left to pick up my petals if it happened. Who would put them on our plant book? And write an inscription about how you’d grasp one of my braids, gently tugging at it. How you did it, that Christmas, to pull me closer, when we were on the back porch and I had pointed out the mistletoe above our heads. How your lips feathered against mine. Like dandelion petals. But softer._

_I wear my hair in one braid now. I often wonder what you’d say. Would you tug on it as well?_

_I turned twelve and neither of us showed up at my birthday party. What a pair we are. Were. Before midgnight came, I wished we had been hiding in my tree house the entire time. I know it won't come true. ___

_Yesterday, mom took me to your grave for the first time. As soon as I was able to get out of bed I begged her to let me visit. At first she refused, but I kept insisting. You always used to say I was too stubborn for my own good._

_Even though my legs are still weak – they felt like twigs about to break with each step – my health is better. I’m getting there. I thought you’d like to hear that._

_That’s why I don’t understand why my mom forced me right back into bed when we returned. She says I haven’t healed yet, the weakness of my body making me see things that aren’t there. She immediately called Dr. Aurelius, who has been visiting me every week. He just left, before talking in hushed voices in the living room with my parents, saying I need more rest and increasing the doze of my pills._

_But it wasn’t inside my head._

_The grass that grows around where you rest isn’t green. No, it’s filled with light blue, the same colour of your eyes. Little flowers spreading everywhere. The same flowers you gave me last. And I know that they’re from you, Peeta. Real or not real?_

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry

**Author's Note:**

> (Chapter 1 note)  
> Random info: I don't know if you play 'Secret friend' or if it goes by a different name in English or something... From where I come from, we played it every year at school until graduation (although by then no one bothered with the clues), and in university with some friends as well. We even started doing it at Christmas a couple years ago, with my family, to save money and make sure that we actually put some thought on what we buy and mean it, instead of buying standard gifts for everyone.
> 
> Part 2 will be up soon.  
> In the meantime, my tumblr is thestuckinbed.
> 
> And comments and kudos are very welcomed, as always. Hope you enjoyed it and thank you for reading!


End file.
